Lynching in America / Lynching in Forsyth County

Marker Text: On September 10, 1912, a 24-year-old Black man named Rob Edwards was lynched and hung in downtown Cumming, Georgia. During this era, deep racial hostility burdened Black people with presumptions of guilt, often resulting in accusations that were unfounded and unreliable. Mr. Edwards was one of several Black men arrested on suspicion of involvement in the fatal assault of a young white woman named Mae Crow. At least 2,000 white residents of Forsyth County formed a mob and stormed the jail. They found Mr. Edwards in his cell, brutally beat him with a crowbar, and shot him repeatedly. The mob then dragged Mr. Edwards through the streets to the town square, where they hung his mutilated body and left it on display. Subsequently, two Black teenagers who were also arrested for Mae Crow’s assault, Ernest Knox and Oscar Daniels, were convicted by all-white juries after trials that lasted one day each. They were hanged before thousands of white spectators. Mr. Edwards’s lynching and the mob violence that followed terrorized the remaining 1,098 Black residents of Forsyth County, who fled the county in fear. The loss of Black-owned property in order to flee arbitrary mob violence was common during this era, and Forsyth’s Black residents left behind their homes and farms to escape, taking with them only what they could carry. Forsyth County would remain essentially all white until the 1990s. No one was ever held accountable for Mr. Edwards’s lynching or the mass exodus of Black residents that followed. Like all victims of racial terror lynchings, Rob Edwards died without due process of law.